Ascension & Pentecost - Vision & Power

May is an exciting time in the church calendar. We have moved through the expectant waiting of Advent and the joy of Christmas. We have entered into sorrow in Lent and celebrated the overthrow of death and sin at Easter. In May we come to the formation of the Church at Pentecost, and the eschatological (final) promises in the Ascension of Christ.

At Pentecost, we as the church are formed and empowered to do Christ’s work on earth. The promised Holy Spirit arrives and gives great boldness to those first disciples. The people around them all thought that they were strange (in this instance, drunk in the morning), and society has found the church, when acting as it should, strange ever since. As our society moves more in a post-Christian reality the church begins to look more and more strange. The governing stories that have dominated the imagination for over a thousand years are shifting and changing. Students of disciplines such as art, history, and philosophy are having to learn the stories from the bible in order to understand the shaping forces that have influenced their chosen fields, having had no knowledge of them before. As these stories shift so to do the values that undergird those stories. I am sure that we all feel the drifting apart of the church and of society, like great ice floats that are slowly drifting apart in the ocean. As this strangeness continues to grow, and we begin to look more and more like the early church did to their society, we will also need the boldness that the Holy Spirit enabled the early church to have. Before Christ’s ascension, he tasked the church with making disciples of every nation. This is no easy task, and will often involve great boldness and sacrifice on our part. Boldness to look foolish, boldness to be rejected, and boldness to be thought of poorly. It also involves sacrifices of time and energy, and more often than not, financial sacrifices as we involve ourselves in the mess of people's lives and feel God’s promptings to help them.

The ascension also plays a great part in this endeavour. The boldness and sacrifice necessary to live as the church in the world is also borne out in Christ’s ascension. It is at the ascension that we hear Christ’s assurance that he will come again. This is not the end. This event, known as the eschaton (the last thing), is foundational for living a Christian life. We as the church are called to at all times have one foot in the present moment; listening for what God is calling us to in this moment, being aware of his presence with us at this moment. But we as the church are also called to have one foot in eternity, never losing sight of where our true home is, and of the last things and the hope that is brought about by that event. It is only this hope of heaven and eternal life that will have enabled those first Christians to have given up their lives willingly to wild animals in the Colosseum, or those Christians today who languish in prisons for their faith or who live in fear of danger to them and their families.

So Pentecost and the ascension bring together the boldness and sacrifice that we need to be God’s church, and to live out his calling for our lives in the here and now whilst holding onto the promises of eternity.

Photo by Josh Eckstein on Unsplash

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If God is All Good and All Powerful, Why Does Suffering Exist?

Image
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga called the problem of suffering “the only good objection to God”. The often quoted argument goes:  “if God is all good (all benevolent) then God has the desire to end suffering, and if God is all-powerful (omnipotent) then God has the ability to end suffering. Therefore if God does not end suffering, then God is either not all good, or is not all-powerful, and is therefore not God”. As Christians, we need to be able to answer this objection to God, to enable us to “give a reason for the faith that we have in Christ Jesus” (1 Peter 3:15). To this end, I want to try and answer this question to help anybody who finds the problem of suffering to be a sticking point or an obstacle in their faith (an argument to explain the problem of suffering is called a “theodicy”). To begin with, I want to go back to the beginning of it all and look at God. Who is God and what is God like? It is worth noting here that this argument takes as given the fact
Keep reading

The Surprising Truth About The Differences Between The Temptation Narratives of Matthew and Luke and What They Teach Us About Overcoming Temptation

Image
  5 MINUTE READ We are now well into Lent , one of the two great fasts in the Christian Calendar ( along with Advent ). Lent is the time when we contemplate Christ’s sacrifice, along with Christ’s 40 days of temptation in the wilderness. When we give up things for Lent we find ourselves tempted in similar, yet far less extreme, circumstances (Let’s be honest, who wants to hang out in the wilderness by themselves for 40 days and eat and drink nothing; I can barely handle giving up chocolate!). Much writing during this time consists of looking at the temptations of Jesus, and how Jesus overcame them as a template for our own overcoming of temptations. But in this post, I do not intend to look at the traditional views, but rather to look at the differences between how Matthew and Luke told the story of Christ’s temptation and what we can learn from these differences. Let’s look at them now. Why Differences are OK We do not like to discuss differences in acco
Keep reading

SANDWICHES - Enhance Your Reading of Mark's Gospel

Image
As followers of Christ, we look to the Bible as one of our main sources of inspiration and guides in our lives. So it follows that we all want our times reading the Bible to be as rich as possible. Learning more about the Bible is one way to help with this. It is particularly helpful when we know the types of things that the authors of the books used to aid us in this task. To this end I wanted to talk about something that has enriched my reading of the gospel of Mark: Markan Sandwiches (also called interpolations ). Essentially, what Mark does is get one story within his gospel, and inserts it inside another story ; this serves the purpose of giving both stories a greater sense of meaning. It’s purpose is to make the reader stop and think “Mark is trying to tell us something important here”. In practice it looks like this: Story 1 – Introduction Story 2 – Introduction & Conclusion Story 1 – Conclusion We can see where the idea of the sandwich comes f
Keep reading